The Miller's grizzled langur, an extremely rare primate that has
suffered from habitat loss over the last 30 years, popped up
unexpectedly in the protected Wehea Forest in east Kalimantan,
Borneo.

"We knew we had found this primate that some people had
speculated was
potentially extinct," said study researcher Stephanie Spehar,
a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. "It was
really exciting."

The shy monkey (Presbytis hosei canicrus) was seen in
the 1970s in Kutai National Park in Borneo, about 50 miles (80
kilometers) from where the new population lives. But as the years
passed, fires and
illegal logging devastated Kutai. By 2008, the Miller's
grizzled langur seems to have vanished from the park. A survey
that year found just five langurs living on the Sangkulirang
Peninsula in East Kalitmantan, also about 50 miles (80 km) away
from the newly discovered langur habitat. But by 2010, that group
of primates had also disappeared.

"At this point, we didn't know if this animal still existed or
whether it was still hiding out in little pockets," Spehar said.

Spehar has been working in the Wehea Forest of Borneo for four
years, but she'd never seen a Miller's grizzled langur there.
Last summer, however, one of her undergraduate students camped
out by a mineral lick area for 10 days, a spot where animals come
to get nutrients from mineral-rich soil and water. The student,
Eric Fell, was conducting his own research project on animals'
use of these licks, and was photographing the creatures that
dropped by. [ Gallery:
Elusive Wildlife Photos ]

Upon returning from his stakeout, Fell showed Spehar his
photographs. Among them were images of long-tailed, black-headed
langurs.

"I knew this was something special," Spehar said. "I knew that it
was something that was unexpected and we hadn't seen before."

Spehar, who credits the find to the work of local communities and
governments that protect the forest and support her research,
showed the photos to another researcher working in the woods, the
director of the conservation organization Ethical Expeditions
Brent Loken. The revelation surprised both parties: It turned out
that Loken's group had also been staking out a mineral lick 5
miles (8 km) away from Fell's with a motion-triggered camera.
They'd captured an image of the same type of
primate. [ Video
of the monkeys ]

"We realized that we had basically rediscovered this animal,"
Spehar said. Taxonomists confirmed the find as a Miller's
grizzled langur. The researchers reported their find today in the
American Journal of Primatology.

The simultaneous discovery suggests that there is a decent-size
population of the langurs in Wehea, but Spehar cautioned that
incredibly little is known about the species. No one knows how
wide the langurs' range is, she said, how many there are, or
their population density. That lack of knowledge isn't uncommon
for many threatened species, according to Loken.

"This monkey represents a lot of species on the planet that we
know very little about," Loken told LiveScience. "We don't know
how many there are, we don't know where they live, what
ecological requirements they need to live, and unless we get some
of that information quickly, some of these species could slip
into extinction before we know anything about them, or even
realize that they're gone."

While Wehea itself is a more than 98,000-acre (40,000-hectare)
oasis of protection, it is surrounded by forest used for logging,
palm oil plantations and mining — the same sort of human uses
that presumably
drove the langurs out of the habitats where they once
thrived. Additionally, the forest is only protected by the local
community, Loken said, not the central government.

That makes the future of the Miller's grizzled langur very
uncertain, Spehar said. She and her colleagues plan to conduct
further research into the monkey's range and behavior to
understand how best to
save it from extinction. Meanwhile, Loken's group and others
are working to secure extra protection for the forest.

"What we hope to do is to work with companies and concessions and
with local governments to ensure this animal's protection,"
Spehar said. "That's the only way we will ensure that it doesn't
disappear."